Elaborations of Carbon
by Downriver
Summary: During a recreational trip to Europe, Dr. Lecter has a chance meeting with the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, and the two paradoxical men engage in a philosophical conversation where two very different perspectives find surprising solidarity. Set pre-Silence of the Lambs. Further explanation within.


**Before I begin, a quick explanation for those of you who are unfamiliar with Eckhart Tolle. He is a popular spiritual teacher, who encourages people to live in the now, and accept whatever 'now' one finds oneself in. He is a very gentle, docile sort of man, who occasionally bursts into a giggle fit. He's adorable. He tells his own story as having been plagued by profound depression for much of his life, and one night, he was experiencing an almost unbearable depression. He suddenly asked himself, 'Who is this self that I cannot live with?' Following this epiphany, he wandered the town in a state of utter bliss, a state which he has not left, since.**

 **The premise of this one-shot is that while wandering the streets after his bedsit epiphany, he encounters a stranger, visiting from America who takes a brief interest in him.**

1977, London…

There is a definite bite in the air, although manageable, being late November and early in the morning. It is still dark out, a cool blue only just peaking beyond the closed curtains of the many sleeping graduate students, professors and of course, their lovers, children and flat mates. The studious residents of Belsize Park await with dread and purpose in equal measure, the sound of their alarms.

Outside, there is the peace which always comes from the lack of human beings. There are always some awake at this hour, of course. However, they are sparse enough for the trees lining the wide, pedestrian-friendly roads to be heard, their gentle creaking in the intermittent lashes of the wind's bitter whip. An old man wearing a herringbone wool cap walks his dog, his free hand gripping the fabric inside his pocket and looks on at the creature, happy and oblivious in his limited consciousness.

Down the thoroughfare, a fieldfare perches on top of a chair on the empty patio of a café, not yet open. He looks about, ruffles his feathers and gives a start. Above, a flock of swallows are departing the city for more favorable weather. Their warbling flock passes over the Lyndhurst Gardens, over the pleasing architectural harmony of uniform Queen Ann buildings. They pass over Keats House, and beyond.

Headed in the opposite direction is a copper leaf. Unlike the purposeful swallows, it is meandering and in no hurry. It makes many stops along it's way, even tumbling past the fieldfare, who watches it, suspiciously. It soars high for a time, grazes along the roof of Belsize Station, and falls with the wind. It has landed now at the entrance of the Tube Station, when it is promptly stepped on by a man in a navy double breasted top coat and wool felt fedora. He stops where he is and looks around briefly, tilts his head as though listening for something and sniffs the air. He wears leather gloves which hang comfortably at his sides. He opens his eyes and removes his hat to reveal a dark, sleek head. He smoothes his hair with one gloved hand and moves on, his hat dangling from his hand and swinging to and fro in the man's leisurely gait which can be attributed to his apparent sabbatical. He is not a resident, but a visitor.

The gentleman finds himself in Primrose Hill. He walks along the pavement, passing the Easter colors of the houses, pastel, quaint and compressed. He passes a bright red telephone kiosk and makes a sharp left turn. He nearly collides with another man, whose expression and disposition are instantly telling of his carelessness. They each take a step back and regard one another before courtesies are exchanged.

"Pardon," the well-dressed gentlemen replies, his pleasant tone not reaching his eyes, which are endless night. The man opposite him, far more humbly dressed observes this unnerving trait, but only chuckles at himself.

" _Es tut mir Leid_ , I am sorry, Sir."

Our gentlmen internally raises an eyebrow at the man's Germanic roots and finds himself absentmindedly patting down the front of his top coat, instead of allowing a rather deep and insidious offense to become noticeable in his expression.

"No problem, at all. Good morning," he replies in parting.

"Might I...buy you an espresso to make amends?" the man asked. His tone was so very gentle and almost maddeningly slow in tempo. The gentleman smiles and bows his head.

"That is not necessary. Good morning."

"Are you quite sure?"

The gentleman had moved away and the question came from behind him and he stopped. He winced internally. At this juncture, it would be rude to say no. He turned around.

"I would be happy to have an espresso with you," he replied, pointing behind the docile young man, "there is a cafe just down that way."

The man nodded, and smiled. "Yes," was all he said.

A strange quiet followed them as they walked. It is not an unsettling sort of quietude, but one of utter tranquility, as though the two men were long and well-acquainted. The wind had died down, and the gentleman replaced his hat. He regarded the younger man, who looked about, as though in a daze. His eyes were as bright as a newborn's, and he found himself mildly intrigued. It was possible, afterall, it would not be an entire waste of his time beyond a serious commitment to courtesy.

Seated now, glad the cafe has just opened, and sunrise begins in earnest. The young man watches his senior remove a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and place them over his eyes. He looks away for a moment, a smile at the corner of his mouth, and then he drinks the enirity of his espresso. His throat undulates with the movement, and he returns the cup to the table.

"I am called Tolle," the young man said, as though this were trivial, surprising and humorous all at once.

" _Sehr erfreut_. You may call me Dr. Fell."

"Alright," Tolle replied, dreamily. "You may call me Eckhart, if you like."

"Fine," replied Dr. Fell, his smile polite, though only raising one side of his mouth indicating amusement, perhaps.

"I ran into you earlier because I was watching the swallows. I had never seen anything so beautiful."

Dr. Fell's smile remained and he only looked at the man.

"Until now, as the sun is rising over the rooftops. Look at the treebranches, black before the pink and purple. Why...it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen! And look at that blue door."

Dr. Fell made no move to follow Tolle's gaze, still only smiling at him, his sunglasses obscuring his eyes.

"Sunrises and swallows. My, my. Have you never seen them before? I find that hard to believe."

"No, I haven't," Tolle said, with a shake of his head. "I never saw a thing before this morning."

"Have they found a cure for blindness here in London?"

"Not that I know of. I only...never _saw_..."

"Never at all, you say?"

"No, Sir."

"On behalf of the sighted world, I welcome you."

Tolle looked at his new companion and then started laughing. It was almost a giggling, though gentle and kindly.

"Amused?" asked Dr. Fell, the very same smile on his inscrutible face.

"Yes," Tolle confirmed through burps of laughter,"although not nearly as much as you, I think."

"I am momentarily interested, anyway," Dr. Fell mused, before finally looking at the sunset. "Tell me young man, what does a sunrise mean to you?"

"Why, nothing at all."

"Oh?"

"Does it mean something to you?"

"It means it's time for espresso, but as you see, I've achieved that already."

"Thanks to my clumsiness!"

"Why, yes. Although I'd rather a clumsy schoolboy than a pickpocket, I suppose. It's rather early for exsanguination, wouldn't you agree?" Dr. Fell smiled, his teeth very small and white, but continued before Tolle could answer. "Where was it you were headed, Eckhart?" "Nowhere. And you?" "Nowhere, actually. I am here on vacation." "Ah." Dr. Fell had expected the young man's next question to be either, 'where are you from', or 'what do you do'. Having asked neither, Dr. Lecter's faltering intrigue was reestablished. "Would you like to go nowhere with me for a short time?" asked Tolle. "Why, yes. I think I would."

When they had paid their fare and returned to the pavement, their conversation resumed.

"What do you do when you're not headed nowhere?" asked. Dr. Fell.

"Oh, I was always headed nowhere. I only thought I was headed somewhere. It's quite funny, now. It wasn't, then. I apologize if I have been incoherent, at all. I am just filled with such bliss, that I suppose I have never attempted a conversation in such a state."

"It's quite alright."

"To truly answer your question, I was doing research at Cambridge University on scholarship, but I dropped out. I was a graduate student, studying psychology, philosophy and literature. Previous to that I was a language teacher. But all of that is only rubbish. None of it changed what I started out as—a deeply depressed boy. But even that description has nothing to do with who or what I am. There is no 'me'. There is only being. And when one is busy being, all kinds of rubbish can get confused with _being_. Which is silly when you think about it. Ha, ha."

Dr. Fell eyed Tolle out of the corner of his eye. This young man was giving him whole chunks of himself with barely a nudge. He was used to that when the individual was sitting across from him in his office, and even sometimes outside of that room. This was decidedly different on two levels. One the one hand, the man had given him the tragic morsel and then reflected it back at himself without a psychiatrist's assistance. He had begun and completed his treatment in a few sentences. On the second level, this feat did not seem to drain him in any way. It was as though he actually believed what he was saying.

Dr. Fell pursed his lips. "What do you suppose brought on this epiphany, Eckhart?"

"I suppose I died, on some level. That… _self_ I could not live with, it appears to be gone. What is left is the only true consciousness that ever really was."

"And what do you suppose killed you, Eckhart? Was it perhaps a frantic self-medication to end your suffering? Did you realize you could not stand to live anymore, and decided it was time to join so many ancestral puppets of Orpheus and kill yourself? Suicide is always far more romantic when there's romance, don't you find? A song of love and death. Love and death, Eckhart. Tell me about the missing half of that marriage."

"I had no love life to speak of, Dr. Fell. I was-"

"Preoccupied with your studies?"

"Yes."

"Tell me about your childhood, then. Let's trace the origins of your need to base an identity on being a schoolboy disguised as a scholar."

Tolle laughed again, soft and gleeful, at Dr. Fell's thinly disguised insult. The truth in it was hilarious, as truth often is, in the right mindset. It was all funny. Hilarious in it's tragedy and beautiful in it's deformity. "Well, I was born in Lünen, Germany and visibly and psychologically scarred by World War II. The environment I grew up in was rather somber. I retreated to books to escape depression, and anxiously searched for a true anecdote for my unhappiness."

"All the way to Cambridge."

"Eventually. "

"Did your family die in the war, Eckhart?"

"No. "

"Did they abuse you, touch you inappropriately?"

No, but they divorced when I was thirteen. My mother sent me to live with my father in Spain when I refused to attend school."

"You refused to attend school. Why?"

"I did not trust people, I only wanted to be on my own. With my books."

"You wanted to disassociate from reality."

"Yes! Ha, ha. Why are you in London, Dr. Fell?"

"Vacation, as I said."

"From what do you have to vacate?"

"Nothing, beyond the lack of culture and profound refinery."

"Do you find your location or company lacking?"

"I live in America, so both."

They looked at one another briefly and then laughed.

"Ordinarily, I prefer Florence or at least Paris. I came to London initially to visit St. Dunstan. I collect church collapses, but some church ruins are also first rate. Destroyed in the Blitz, I'm sure you know. St Dunstan as abbey I think was quite certain of his Canonization. His mother certainly enjoyed regaling how she too knew of her child's beautific destiny, claiming that a messenger miraculously told her. It reminded me of something, I wasn't sure immediately. Then I remembered that Keats' home wasn't far. Keats believed he was born in the inn his father hostlered. Such humble beginnings, which certainly don't remind us of Christ."

"Have you already been there, then?"

"Not yet. But I'm sure I'll make my way when it suits me. Do you relate at all to the pious abbey? How about Keats, with his romanticism? Has a messenger come to you in the night? Did a candelabrum extinguish most miraculously? If you manage to share your epiphany with the world, do you think they'll canonize you? You'd have to die first, but then again, the self never truly dies, does it? Eckhart?"

"I don't know if the self dies. But it is of no matter. There is only now. And now, there are two squirrels chasing each other round and round that tree, do you see? Ha, ha!"

"Right now, in this moment, the only one which exists, Eckhart, do you believe you are immortal?"

"I don't know how I could know that, Dr. Fell. How can anyone? Science, literature, philosophy and psychology have all attempted to answer that question. I sense you do not believe in an immortal soul, Dr. Fell. Is that right?"

"You're a dutiful schoolboy, Eckhart. You understand photosynthesis, don't you?"

"I remember what I've been taught."

"Such biochemical considerations lead to the following observation: when I breathe next to a plant doing photosynthesis, I consume the oxygen liberated by this plant. When I release carbon dioxide it is then assimilated by the plant. It follows that the carbon dioxide that was _me_ a while ago has now become part of the plant and conversely the oxygen that the plant liberated has been integrated in my body. If I talk in terms of self and non-self, part of what is now the plant was me a few seconds ago and vice-versa.

"The same principle can be applied to whatever I consume, be it pork, dates, kale or wheat. What was once swine or fruit or seeds has become integrated with me, and so is now me. Until I am finished with it, at which point my _self_ becomes a _non-self_. On the other hand, once I have made the necessary adjustments that my metabolism requires, these components that were me can now be taken up as nutrients by plants and bacteria. And indeed, haven't we used animal manure in the fields as fertilizer for millennia?"

"So you are saying…we exchange ourselves with the environment all of the time."

"And what do you think the implications of that could be where religion or philosophy is concerned?"

"I don't know."

"We are only concepts, Eckhart. Animals and plants and micro-organisms all appear as entities, but that is only an illusion. Through the nutrient cycles, we are all exchanging ourselves with the external environment, as you said. In some ways, we are only concepts of ourselves."

The two men had found themselves in a park, and sat down on a bench. Two women walked past them, both silently amused and more than a little intrigued by the refined man with his young, elfin companion. The younger of the two smiled coyly at the enigmatic Dr. Fell, before finding herself looking quickly away and walking more briskly. Dr. Fell watched her as she disappeared around a corner, and smiled to himself.

"You can take it further, if you like. The carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our bodies, as well as atoms of all other heavy elements, were created in previous generations of stars over 4.5 billion years ago. "

They watched as a man hurried past carrying his groceries. In the crook of his arm, he held a bag which clearly contained a bundle of apples. Dr. Fell gestured to him. "To make apple pie, you must first invent the universe."

Tolle and Dr. Fell glanced at one another again and cackled.

"So then, one way or another, so long as there is _anything_ , we are," said Tolle.

"And always have been."

"And the self-"

"There is no self. Only different representations of the same atoms."

"By that logic, everything we do is rendered pointless."

"Not at all. We are here right now, and the fact that there is no point in it should not detract in it's meaning, at all. There is no intrinsic meaning in anything at all, Eckhart. Only judgments have that kind of power, and it isn't really power at all."

"No, power is an illusion. As are judgments. And judgments only serve to make one suffer."

"And I expect you greatly desire to be free from suffering, Eckhart. After all, you have killed one of your selves in order to start over again. The pointlessness of consciousness does not render the experience anemic. Why should anything have meaning?"

"Quite right."

"Your sunrise, it had no meaning to you. But still you can enjoy it without calling it anything, comparing it to anything, or, most debasing of all, comparing it to something else. "

"I think, Dr. Fell, that one of the most important things I have discovered is that accepting whatever now is is paramount to maintaining contentedness. Suppose you said 'yes' to whatever 'now' came your way."

"Let me ask you this, Eckhart. What if I were to invite you back to my room. After I take your coat I might offer you some tea. Upon drinking your tea, you find yourself rather sleepy. When you wake, you are hanging upside down by your feet. Then I proceeded to flay you over long periods of time, before ultimately eating your face. Would you say _yes_ to that, if it were your _now_?"

Eckhart did not speak for a time, although his sanguinity did not falter, to Dr. Fell's approval. He stared forward and watched a parade of leaves which rushed past them with a gust of wind, the cruelty of which appeared to have returned. Dr. Fell removed his hat again, smoothed his dark sleek head. He removed his sunglasses and looked at Eckhart who returned his gaze.

"If it were my _now_ , I would have no choice in saying yes to it. To say no would only be the illusion of power. And that would be the true root of my suffering."

Dr. Fell looked on, and Tolle looked into eyes the color of which he had never observed. He looked at eyes which looked deep down into him, but he felt no fear.

"However, Sir…should you make such a kind offer, I am disinclined to accede."

Dr. Fell raised his eyebrows, and once more, the two men laughed. Dr. Fell replaced his sunglasses and stood.

"Eckhart, the world is more interesting with you in it. You'll never see the inside of my room. Good luck to you."

"And you, Dr. Fell."

"Good morning," Dr. Fell offered, his head bowed.

"Good morning."

Eckhart watched the intriguing gentleman as he walked down the path, unhurried, his top coat pitching at another gust of wind, his arms held out a length for just a moment as he playfully twirled his hat in one hand. Then he disappeared behind the bend. A nervous little fieldfare watched on from a tree branch, before flitting away, across the park and over Dr. Fell. Past Rose Hill and over Keats's house, where a group of tourists were already beginning to congregate.

Marbling is the amount of fat interspersed with lean meat, and it is found in abundance in this crowd of self-aggrandizing elaborations of carbon. However, on this biting autumn morning, one of them will be reassigned, exchanged, and like all pseudo-entities, shall remain immortal.

* * *

Dr. Lecter loosely quotes Jean-Pierre Jacquot and Carl Sagan (ignoring the fact that Sagan did not say this until the eighties, and this is set in 1977.)

The timeline should be pretty fair. Eckhart Tolle had his bedsit epiphany in Belsize Park about 41 years ago. In keeping with Harris' timeline, Dr. Lecter would have been nearing the end of his psychiatric practice to be caught by Will Graham. He is about 44, and Tolle is in his early twenties.


End file.
